A few years ago I took an inventory of all the film I had and created an Excel spreadsheet so I would know how much film I had, of what type, and how old it was. Over time the data began to slip when I forgot to update the inventory upon shooting a rol or acquiring more. I’ve been meaning to update it for a while now, and today was the day.
It turns out I have a lot of film. One hundred and sixty eight rolls (or, in the case of 4×5, boxes) to be exact. And I have fifteen more rolls heading my way next week! This has been acquired since I started predominantly shooting film again around 2016. I bought a bit here, a bit there, but clearly at a greater rate than I manage to use it.
The breakdown is as follows:
- 45 rolls / boxes of black and white film
- 88 rolls / boxes of colour negative film
- 35 rolls of colour reversal film
The breakdown by format is:
- 35mm – 86 rolls
- Medium format – 78 rolls
- 4×5 – 4 boxes – apart from one these are not full ( a couple of them only have 6 sheets remaining)
The majority of the film in the stash is also expired. a few rolls are several decades old, but most is quite recently expired and, as it’s been refrigerated or frozen, should be perfectly fine to use still, although I am conscious of the fact that it ain’t getting any fresher either!
The breakdown of expiry by decade is:
- 1970s – 2 rolls
- 1980s – 5 rolls
- 1990s – 9 rolls
- 2000s – 24 rolls
- 2010s – 19 rolls
- 2020s – 76 rolls
- Unknown expiry – 7 rolls
- In date – 26 rolls
What this exercise tells me, is that I ought to stop buying any more film and shoot what I have. To be fair on myself, this is what I’ve been doing but, unless I start using a motor drive, it’s a slow process and likely to be curtailed sometimes when I need to buy film that I use often (such as 400asa black and white like HP5+ or Tri-X) or, thankfully less frequently, when I see a deal on film that is worth taking advantage of (as is the case with the 15 rolls I have coming soon).
But the stuff I already have, well I need to start making a better effort to go and shoot it, particularly in the case of the much older stuff (some more Expiriment posts, perhaps?), but also with the stuff that I perhaps hold onto because I see it as precious, maybe because it is no longer in production, or perhaps because it is expensive. I have a tendency to hold onto this film while I wait for the perfect conditions to shoot it, conditions which rarely occur. While I don’t want to waste film on throwaway photography, I do need to be less prescriptive on where and when I will shoot film that is getting longer and longer in the tooth.
I’m fortunate to have acquired such a stash – I could shoot a roll a week for over three years and not run out – but I really want to see it reduce somewhat. Maybe I’ll gift a few rolls as Christmas presents, but what I really need to do is get out and shoot some of it!
Steel City Snapper photography 
I identify with this. I haven’t bought film in a year and yet I have more now than a year ago. I keep coming into more film. It’s a storage problem.
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I have a bit of space in the fridge, and the full drawer in the freezer. Short of me buying a dedicated film fridge, I’m out of space! Plus, I think that if I did buy a film fridge it would only encourage me to fill it. 🙂
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Wow! lol. I should do this too, but I “be afraid”! I’m pretty sure I’d have more! Not that this is a good thing – like you I should get out and shoot more. I have more b/w, less colour (I think), and I’ve been trying not to buy more for a year already! I think this stems from the threat of price rises, stock running out or being discontinued but lets be honest FP4 isn’t going anywhere. It’s just a failing I have – it was the same shooting video, I had a stash of mini DV tapes, enough for the BBC, when I did things on DVD I used to buy them in outers of 600! I WILL use it all :)- Happy shooting! Cheers Andy
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It’s almost a squirrel-like need to collect it, isn’t it? If they stop making film all of a sudden, we’ll be safe with our hoards to see us through the film winter. 🙂
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Some first-world problems are fantastic to have.
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Oh, definitely. I’d rather have something and not need it, than need it and not have it. I just don’t need quite as much! 🙂
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Nonsense. haha.
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I feel your pain. I was up to about 100 rolls at the start of the year, and have got it down to 50. I talk about the process here:
And yeah, you have to use up the “special” stocks, otherwise they’ll just sit around in the freezer forever. I managed to go through all but one roll of the Fujicolor 100 I got in Japan last year. And I did that by just using it rather than hold off for “just the right occasion.”
The one tricky stock is slide film, as you really do need the right occasion, namely good light, otherwise you are just wasting it. I hope to shoot some soon to capture fall color.
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That’s a great post and you’ve expressed what I feel with great eloquence.
Slide film is an issue as, like you, I tend to favour bright, sunny conditions (although the same is true for colour negative as well). I tend to prefer black and white when the weather is dull.
That said, I did shoot some colour film on a grim day at the seaside recently (I’ve not posted them on the blog yet), and those turned out very nicely, really capturing the feel of the conditions without robbing them of all colour.
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I have a fridge out in the garage for my film – my stash is not quite as big as yours, and there is some expired film as well. Much of it has been refrigerated since new, and is fine to shoot, some is of unknown provenance and I use that when I need to shoot a test roll! But I always try to keep 20 – 30 rolls of fresh film in case I am ever asked to photograph something important at short notice!
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I feel much better now as I was worrying I had too much with only 67 rolls. However I obsess more about cutting down the variety of film stocks than the number of rolls. I have come to realise that shooting a familiar subject on a different film stock to see what it looks like can be a bit of a distraction and I would be better off searching for subjects that are really meaningful to me and then shooting them with just one or two reliable film types. In B&W I’ve narrowed the choice down to FP4, HP5, XP2, and Adox HR-50. I only have a few rolls of Kodak Vision colour film left, and when they run out it will be B&W only for me. I also shoot quite a lot of paper negative, but that’s another story.
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67 rolls seems a sensible quantity to me. 🙂
I’m trying to do something similar in terms of variety – reducing what I buy to a handful of trusted stocks for consistency. Trying new stuff is fun but it can be unpredictable, and the large supply of all manner of things in my stash ought to curb that urge for awhile!
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